Subway theft is up 23 percent from this time last year, the NYPD has reported. The most targeted items are electronics.

A man absorbed in his tablet device while riding the subway. (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Many subway riders say they try to stay alert and protect their possessions. But observation and conversation suggest they could be doing more to prevent theft, and, in the event that they fall victim to crime, to recover their stolen items.

“Someone could just come up and snatch it right out of your hand, and then what are you going to do?” said Nick Diaz, a Williamsburg resident.

“I definitely feel like I pay attention to my electronic devices on the train. I hide my headphone cord so it’s not as obvious that I have an iPhone,” he said.

On Thursday afternoon, the Brooklyn-bound L train was filled with passengers. Many of them were absorbed in an electronic device—a smartphone, mp3 player, e-reader or tablet computer.

One of these was Christina Ionno, a stylish twenty-something headed for the Grant Street stop. Upon boarding the train, she immediately pulled out her iPhone 4S and tapped out a lengthy text message—while listening to music on her iPod.

When asked about her tech habits, she laughed and admitted she gets wrapped up in the devices. Still, she knows not to make herself a target.

“I always try and be cautious when I’m on the subway, especially when I’m standing,” she said. “I’m usually pretty aware of my bag.”

The NYPD has deployed undercover officers to pose as unsuspecting tech users in order to catch thieves red-handed. But the first line of defense, authorities agree, should be users themselves.

“I do think about it,” said Phyllis Ma, an L rider who boarded at Graham Avenue. “If I’m on the train late at night, I won’t listen to my iPod.”

Ma wasn’t aware of the increase in occurrences of theft, but said she became more cautious after a friend’s iPod was stolen in broad daylight in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Partly to blame for the rise in subway theft is the growing ubiquity of expensive handheld digital devices. The various models of Amazon’s Kindle as well as iPhones, iPads and similar products are catnip to crooks.

With the holiday shopping season gathering steam, it’s likely that more digital devices will be making their way into consumers’ hands. Tablet global tablet sales are expected to reach 59 million by the end of 2011, according to research firm Canalys. And industry sources who spoke to DigiTimes last July have projected that Apple will sell 60 million iPads in 2012 alone.

Ionno admitted she hasn’t installed any applications that could help police recover her mobile device if it were stolen.

“I just got the iPhone and I haven’t looked into that yet,” she said.

These applications include Apple’s Find My iPhone and Find My iPad and Blackberry’s Protect, all free to download.

Diaz does have Find My iPhone installed on his device. “I just got it,” he said. “I haven’t had a reason to use it yet, thank God.”

One defense against thieves may be a return to good old-fashioned print media—at least while riding the rails. Straphangers willing to risk looking antiquated can put away the Kindle and pull out a paperback. It’s hard to imagine a thief pouncing on a dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

The protestors plan to take their protests on to the subway service in the afternoon, followed by a march to the Brooklyn Bridge at 5 p.m.

On the other side, sat a woman holding tightly to a stroller. A braces-faced boy, barely a teenager, got on the train at Fulton Street and sat next to the woman with the stroller, and in front of the man reading the Bible. As the boy took a seat, his backpack brushed the man’s knee, interrupting his reading. The boy did not notice and took a sip from his Coca Cola bottle.
The man stopped reading his Bible. “Excuse me, bro,” he mumbled under his breath.

The boy wasn’t paying attention.

“You can’t just step on someone’s shoe, my man,” the man continued, slightly louder, as he put away his Bible.

“You can’t just sit wherever man! And now you scuffed my shoe!” he yelled.

The boy looked at him, “I didn’t do anything to you, man. It was a mistake.”

“You weren’t raised right,” the man began to preach. “People better raise their boys right.”

The boy said nothing, but his face was tight. He looked embarrassed and annoyed as he scooted closer to the woman gripping the stroller. The man continued his rant and the boy stood up to walk away.
The man kicked his foot as if to trip him.

“Don’t think that because you’re a kid I won’t smack you and wait for your parents,” the man yelled.
The boy said nothing. His face was still tight as he walked to the other end of the train.
“What a good boy, not saying anything to that crazy man,” said a woman seated across from the scene said to the older man sitting next to her. She shook her head in disgust.

“Ha, and he was reading a Bible,” the older man said as he, too, began to shake his head.
The boy got off the train at Jay Street, and the man returned to his Bible.

According to the New York Times, an additional train will run on the L line between 9 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. on weekdays starting in December. Subway officials have also promised to start running more weekend trains in summer 2012.

These additions were prompted by an in-depth New York City Transit study that showed, among other things, that the L train has seen a 141 percent increase in ridership since 1998, compared with 53 percent across the subway system at large. On Saturdays during the peak hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., L trains sometimes hold as much as 35 percent more passengers than the recommended capacity.

Get the full story at the City Room blog.

By Ivana Kottasová

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Michael Cirino explains the logistics of the event to the team of volunteers. Photo Ivana Kottasová/The Brooklyn Ink

Jim Kelly enjoyed his lunch. Creamy potato puree was spread across a shiny square plate. Four cubes of filet mignon were soaked in bordelaise sauce and topped with asparagus tips. Silver cutlery shined. The sauce was dark and delicious. He could have been in any high-end restaurant in New York. But he was on the L-train, traveling across Brooklyn. His next course, cheese, would be delivered a few stops down the line.
Kelly was one of 12 guests invited to a six-course meal on the L-train, organized by an underground culinary collective called A Razor, A Shiny Knife. The group, run by New Yorkers Michael Cirino and Daniel Castano, brands itself as theatrical culinary experience. This is invitation-only dining, a rising trend in New York City.
They are known for surprising their guests and taking the idea of dining a few steps further. Or, in this case, a few stops further.
Cirino and his team had been planning the subway event since December. It was while they were in Los Angeles, driving around the city and throwing out ideas for events, when a friend of the collective said: “We should do something on the subway.” Cirino recalled five minutes of thinking, “And then we all knew we will do it.”
Planning and preparing took months. Cirino and his team rode the L train several times, taking notes on the intervals between stops, scribbling into notebooks and spreadsheets, jumping on and off the train and making brief sketches of each of the stations, noting vital information —Where is the bench, where is the garbage, how wide is the platform? Every detail mattered. “We must have looked really shady,” said Mike Lee, the captain of the team in charge of the main course.
Gradually, the team grew to 60 people. Friends, people from other culinary groups and supper clubs, their friends. Yet Cirino and his pals managed to keep it secret. None of the guests had any idea about the journey ahead of them as they gathered on Sunday afternoon. They bought their $100 tickets weeks in advance and were promised a nice lunch by a famous culinary group. The tickets were sold on first-come, first-served bases to those who responded to an invitation send to the group’s mailing list.
“When I came to the meeting point, I assumed there was a building around somewhere,” Jim Kelly, a guest on the train lunch, said. “When they took us to the train, I though we were getting to some other destination but then I realized the train was the destination.”
The guests were escorted to the train and seated on two benches in the middle of the second car of a Brooklyn-bound train. Four provisional tables with holes for water glasses were hanging from the poles, secured by a complicated mechanism involving several strings and pieces of wood.
The first course was fluke with bone marrow.
Meanwhile, on Morgan Avenue stop in East Williamsburg, the team preparing the main course was getting ready for their turn. They spent two hours practicing the serving of the most complex dish of the ride. A friend of a friend provided an apartment near the subway stop that became the base camp for the main course team.
But it wasn’t just the guests who had no clue. It was not until two hours show time that one of the volunteers, Ben Lambert, found out what was going on. “Michael just asked me if I could help out with a picnic.”
Lambert was one of a handful of professional chefs (he is soon opening a restaurant in Manhattan) involved in the lunch. The majority of people were from other fields – healthcare, marketing, art. “We just like eating,” Laura Huben, another volunteer, said, as she prepared the desert, featuring cocoa, raspberries and lavender.
At 1:45 pm, about 15 minutes after the train took off from Manhattan, Huben and her team were lined up on the Morgan Avenue station in East Williamsburg.
Six people, dressed in matching outfits (blue jeans and black shirts) rehearsed every move involved in plating and serving the dish: Take the plates. Put them on two trays. Spread a bit of mashed potatoes on each plate. Place four pieces of beef on top of that. And finally add an asparagus tip on each piece of meat. Board the train. Pretend that this is the most normal thing for you. All in under two minutes.
Just before the train arrived, the group calmed down. Nobody joked anymore; everybody concentrated on a task. The train came. The door slid open. And the party was not on it.
Sense of panic took over for a minute. Lee was worried either the police or the MTA dissolved the event. Even though eating on the train is not illegal, everybody knew that causing havoc on the subway could potentially get them into a trouble with less a sympathetic officer.
But they were just running late. When the next train arrived, it was go time.
Everyone jumped on the train so the serving could start. The volunteers had to deliver the plates as quickly as possible, so that the guests had enough time to enjoy it before it was time to pack everything up and leave the train to make room for the cheese course. After all, the train ride is only about 40 minutes long.
On Halsey Street station, the main course crew got off the train. The atmosphere was euphoric and full of hugs, high-fives and shoulder pats. “This was ridiculous,” Mike Lee said. “I wish I could have stayed on for longer,” Soo Baik, another volunteer, added.
Meanwhile, a few stops ahead, the next team was preparing the dessert.

Prosecutors claim that Ahmedzay, along with his co-defendants Najibullah Zazi, 24, and Adis Medunjanin, 25, traveled to Pakistan and an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. All three men are charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to Al Qaeda.

A guilty plea by Ahmadzay would leave Medunjanin as the only remaining defendant in the case facing trial. Ahmedzay is set to enter a guilty plea in the afternoon in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. He faces a possible life sentence.

A 19-year-old Brooklyn man and two of his pals were hit with double-murder raps on Thursday night for fatally knifing two men on a downtown No. 2 train, police said late yesterday. This is according to the Daily News, which has more on the story. Brenddy Garcia confessed to being the knife-wielding butcher in the horrific subway slaughter early Sunday morning, police said. “He’s the one who did the cutting,” a police source said. But after a lengthy grilling at the NYPD’s 6th Precinct stationhouse on Thursday night, police also charged Franklin Varella, 21, of Manhattan, and Diogenes Hernandez, 21, of Queens, with two counts of murder.

Disturbed Man Scares Cops with Terrorist Impression

An emotionally disturbed man gave police at a Brooklyn precinct the scare of their lives, repeatedly yelling, “Allah!” after showing up with a wire wrapped around his waist, the Daily News reports. The incident last week sent civilians and cops running from the 61st Precinct stationhouse while other officers subdued the suspect, Marwan Mohemed, 22. The wire turned out to be an extension cord used as a belt, and Mohemed was admitted to Coney Island Hospital for psychiatric observation. Read more here.

Brooklyn Still  Worst Census Borough

With a measly 34% participation rate, Brooklyn is still the borough with the lowest numbers in New York, followed by Queens (38%) and the Bronx (40%). This is not making Borough President Markowitz happy. He said recently that ”Everybody wants more, more, more. The only way you’re going to have a chance to get more, more, more is to fill out those census forms.” People who don’t return the forms by the third week in April will receive a visit from census workers, costing the feds roughly $60 per visit. Read more here at the Daily News.

There are disruptions on the blue, red and green lines (A, 2, 3, 4, 5) and the Brooklyn ends of the B and Q.